One Mile Off

Hollywood Connect Thursday E-mail - February 18, 2010

A while back, I watched a film that I had seen before. I’d never actually seen it, but I had seen it before, if you catch my nuance. I walked into the theater with high expectations for a movie that had already made quite a bit of money and on which the critics had bestowed a generous litany of superlatives: Ambitious! Breathtaking! Stunning! A Phenomenon!

So you can imagine my disappointment when, at about the 15-minute mark, I realized that I already knew this film that I had never seen before. Without naming the offending piece of cinema, I’ll just say that for a movie that was almost three hours long, there wasn’t much that was new. The plot, the characters, the arcs, the twists – the film was a oft-told story barely wrapped in a new skin stretched thin. It was a formula-driven movie offering me what I already had in my possession. I could predict everything that was going to happen, and so I found myself trapped in a state of artistic déjà vu.

Nothing in the experience of life can be perfectly predicted, and that is what makes formulaic art so distasteful. It makes predictable by contrivance that which ultimately is not predictable. That is, it attempts to portrays an unpredictable life in a way that the audience member can predict.

“I saw the ending coming a mile off.” That phrase is spoken, in nearly every instance, in the pejorative. Because life is full of surprises with unseen and unknown causes, shouldn’t the art which imitates life do the same? It is one of our creative challenges as artists – to avoid the predictable.

But that’s not how we always approach life or art though, is it? So many people are looking for a formula for success in life and art, and that is where they get tripped up, because there isn’t one. There is no predictability in life, and neither should there be in art. Even God’s love – that wonderful, inscrutable absolute – is unpredictable. How many times have you expected the love of God to do one thing and incredibly, it did something else? A zig instead of a zag. Taking you left when you thought it would take you right. It is a demonstration of, as one poet wrote, “the reckless, raging fury that they call the love of God.”

In this life, we crave predictability because we think we want safety and security; but secretly, deep down, we long for adventure. Let your life and your art reflect that longing by avoiding the formulaic, the dogmatic, the foreseeable. Make room for surprises. Abandon all of life’s clichés in favor of the unpredictable.

All my best,

Shun Lee
Director
Hollywood Connect
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Twitter: @Shun_Lee @HwoodConnect
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